


These Days

by beckettemory



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Ghost Drifting, Headaches & Migraines, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, M/M, Old Age, Very Post Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-19
Updated: 2013-11-19
Packaged: 2018-01-02 02:12:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1051315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beckettemory/pseuds/beckettemory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The human brain is only meant to hold one human life. Add any more and problems arise.<br/>Set 39 years after the closing of the Breach, in Berlin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Days

These days it was getting harder for them to move around.

Hermann had traded his cane for a wheelchair ten years ago, and Newt had given in and started using a cane eight years later. Unable to bear the drab grey aluminum cane his doctor had given him, he had disappeared into his workshop (as he called the small third bedroom in their Berlin apartment) for hours at a time, emerging for meals and rest with a progressively garish cane. By the time he finished with it, it had rainbow stripes painted on it with glittery paint, it glowed in the dark, and when he pressed a button near the handgrip the rubber tip at the end (which had been plain black but had been traded for a clear one) lit up blue like the slimy tendrils of Otachi’s tongue all those years ago.

Hermann’s newest wheelchair, by contrast, was a custom sleek black electric chair with no modifications except a homemade holder for his cane, which he rarely used but refused to give up.

Newt’s cane had never been used correctly. His doctor had taught him how but he had successfully tuned out all of it except how tall it should be. This resulted in Newt walking a couple metres ahead of Hermann, stopping every once in a while as he got off rhythm, cursing loudly at the cane, as Hermann followed steadily behind him, yelling. They usually forgot about their neural connection when they left the house, too distracted by all the people and sounds to communicate effectively within their headspace. So the people of Berlin would be subject to their bickering, interspersed with bits of various languages, flowing from Chinese to German to English to French in the same breath.

“No, you need to step with your bad leg and the cane _at the same time_ ,” Hermann would shout.

“No way old man! I distinctly remember you walking just like this when you actually used yours,” Newt would call back, not paying any attention to the Berliners streaming past them warily.

“I most certainly did not!”

“You did too! I have video documentation—“

“Video documentation,” Hermann would scoff. “And when, pray tell, did you record it?”

“I don’t have time to remember when I recorded you walking with that stupid thing! We’re going to be late for the party if you don’t hurry your ass up,” Newt would retort. Hermann usually responded by turning up the speed on his chair and zipping past Newt and not stopping until he reached the corner and Newt was half a block behind, just to agitate the man, and then waiting until he caught up and they could bicker again.

These were the best days.

Occasionally Newt’s knees would cooperate for a whole day. On one such occasion, he spotted Hermann whirring out of the second bedroom (his study) with a stack of books perched on his lap and reaching his chin. An idea popped into his head, and he crept up behind Hermann as he made his way to the front room, intent on scaring him.

He was closing in.

Just a few feet more.

“Don’t _even_ think about it, Newton,” Hermann warned, surprising Newt, the exact opposite of the intended result. He had forgotten the headspace. Again.

These were the best days.

But the bad days more than overshadowed the good.

There were some days when Hermann’s hip and leg were too bad to sit up for even half an hour to run to the store for more milk or bread or tea while Newt was at the university teaching. There were days when Newt's anxiety went through the roof or his knees swelled to the size of grapefruits and he was forced to cancel his classes for the day.

At the PPDC’s request, they’d continued to drift with each other every once in a while in laboratory settings. The PPDC wouldn’t disclose why they really wanted to keep their neural connection active, but Hermann and Newt postulated that they were worried about the Kaiju. Understandable.

But then again, Mako and Raleigh, as well as the few remaining jaeger teams that had graduated the Ranger program shortly after the Breach closed, had also been asked to keep going, and none of them had drifted with a Kaiju.

The motives were unclear, but the effects were crystal.

Mako and Raleigh (now 61 and 66, respectively, and living in New York City in a platonic marriage) had reported the shared headaches a few years before Hermann and Newt had begun experiencing them. The others evidently had, too, leading the nearly-retired scientists to conclude that it had something to do with the continued Drift itself.

The human brain is only meant to hold one human life. Add any more and problems arise.

Hermann and Newt each held not only their own 74 years in their heads, but each other’s, and the strain of 148 years between them spilled over into headaches that were so intense they affected not only their physical heads but their minds and shared headspace itself.

These. These were the worst days.

These days they felt the pain start at the base of their skulls and knew to cancel all classes for the next three or four days, get stocked up on headache-friendly foods (poptarts, instant ramen, toaster pastries, anything that could be made and consumed in ten minutes), send a preliminary report to the techs and doctors at the PPDC labs, and hunker down to wait for the storm to pass.

These days they shuttered the windows, turned on every piece of noise-cancelling equipment they could afford, and crawled into bed together wearing the comfiest pyjamas they owned. They would tuck an extra blanket around themselves and press their foreheads together, their hands clasping each other’s, their legs intertwined. An outside observer would have called it a lover’s embrace, but to them it felt like clinging to the mast of a ship in a hurricane. The steadiest place to hold on happened to also roll with the waves.

These days they squeezed their eyes shut and held on for dear life as it felt like their brains and the minds inside (and outside, and everywhere else) were ripped to shreds with rusty knives.

These days they would go in and out of consciousness, always together. When the pain let up enough for them to open their eyes they knew they had enough time to use the bathroom or eat something before they were swallowed again.

Medication did nothing. They refused surgery.

Once, a doctor had suggested they allow a trained Drift technician to enter their Drift with them to diagnose the problem. They immediately said no, feeling violated at the mere thought of anyone else inside their minds. Mako and Raleigh had also refused, as had everyone else.

A ray of hope broke through when, five years into their almost monthly headaches, Mako and Raleigh suggested they try intravenous fluids and nutrients while they were incapacitated. The Rangers had been talked into it, and while it didn’t even begin to take the edge off the pain, they weren’t emerging on the other side dehydrated and a couple pounds lighter anymore. Hermann and Newt decided to give it a shot and were surgically implanted with ports in their chests that would act as permanent IV access.

Two weeks later they were pulled under and they tried out the fluids, and when the searing pain dissipated, they felt better than they had in years.

These were the worst days, but they were getting better.

And then they got worse.

The headaches stayed longer, came more frequently.

The PPDC required them to undergo MRIs each time they came out of one. Just in case, they said. Two machines were rigged up side by side in the same room. These days, phantom pains when they got too far apart meant that they were always together. Newt was a lot slower on his feet these days, so Hermann matched his speed rather than the other way around. They found that even at the same distance the pains could be kept more at bay if they were touching, so they were usually holding hands as well.

“People will think we’re married,” Newt joked one day as they walked to the grocer.

“We _are_ married, you git,” Hermann replied, too tired to joke back.

Newt just chuckled.

These days they were cancelling more classes than they were attending, so at the end of the fall semester the year they both turned 75, they retired and began collecting hefty pensions. They had remained in high demand until the end, despite their spotty attendance and inconsistent energy levels.

These days they would call Mako and Raleigh almost daily, fully aware that only a handful of people in the world even understood what their lives were like. They would talk as long as they could, asking to talk to the kids and teasing them when their grades in science and math weren’t up to their lofty standards.

These days they bickered with less intensity. These days they made sure to call Sofie, Hermann’s daughter, once a week.

These days when they went in for testing they hummed songs together, Hermann humming one part of a complex melody, Newt another, mostly for the children in the waiting room and the nurses seeing to them. These days they held hands until it was time to lie back on the hard tables of the imaging machines. These days, “rockstar” had replaced most terms of endearment, and the techs laughed at the archaic term.

These days, before they fell asleep, they threaded their fingers together, kissed, and pressed their foreheads together, almost unable to remember a life before the Kaiju, before the PPDC, before the Drift, before fate (or the Marshall) brought them together.

These were the days. 


End file.
